Stylistics and its contribution to the second-year students of the English department at Bejaïa University

Abstract

In this research work, we are probing into the contribut i on of st ylist i cs as a new li terary approach to second-year students at the English department of Bejaia Universi t y. We attempt to know whether the students will grasp this new approach. In doing so, we base ourselves on three main cri teria which are devel oped wi t hin the body of this thesis. Our aim is also to correct a very recurring syntactic error our students are used to making through the stylist i c approach and in parti cular through M.A. K Halliday’s linguist i c theory of the ‘Clause Complex’. Our first goal is to make the students understand the theoreti cal background of this new area of study; then, we are going to opt for one stylist ic approach which we will apply to all the texts we will study in the classroom. Besi des, our students’ syntacti c error, namely, the use of f ragment sentences is an important one to correct since 47 students out of 114 are making i t. We shall explain in details how we will proceed in the treatment and remedial work in the second half of our experimental part. As to the basic quest i ons thi s research work rai ses, they are as foll ows: 1) Will the use of st ylist ics hel p students in interpreting li terary texts by being immersed in the web and levels of language? 2) Will this course be contribut ing to improving our students’ wri ting skill by focusing on one of thei r main weaknesses, namely, clause distincti ons in sentencesyntax? We have started the present study wi t h 160 students and then we have retained 114 out of 160 because we want the students not to have more than two absences during the whol e experiments. Out of 114 assiduous students, 62 students are consi dered successful according to the three cri teri a we have selected and which we will be devel oping subsequent ly. Considering the fact that the students have only pract i ced the li terary analyses during one short second semester, we can consider our resul ts as encouraging. We can opt for extending the peri od to one full academic year and remark if we can improve our resul ts. As to our syntacti c error, thanks to error correcti on feedbacks (a correl ate of wri tten correcti on on the students’ papers, metalinguist i c explanat i on( Halliday’s theory), elici tat ion and repet i t i on through the context of li t erary texts), we have succeeded in correcting their error since only 1 out 47 students i s st ill wri t ing f ragment sentences in the post-test at the end of the year.